In May I visited Scotland for the first time. It was a long train journey from Norfolk to Inverness (total of 10 hours!) so we split it up with a few nights in Edinburgh. We didn’t stay in Inverness but in Nethy Bridge, a small but well-known village in the Abernethy forest in the Cairngorms national park.

Here’s what we got up to!

Visit the Ospreys

The RSPB run the Osprey Centre in Loch Garten and here you can see from the viewing point at this time of year the osprey nest. We saw the female with her eggs sitting on the nest! It would have been great to see the male coming in to feed them but sadly he hadn’t been seen for a few days.

Credit: Psylexic

This place is quite special because after being persecuted to extinction in the UK a pair of ospreys returned to this spot 50 years and ospreys have been coming back ever since. There are now around 400 breeding pairs in the UK, most of which reside in Scotland so it’s a rare conservation success story. You can watch a live nest cam here.

Osprey nest

The Loch

Caledonian forest

Linnet

Dolphin Spotting on the Moray Firth

We took a boat trip into the Moray Firth in Inverness and hoped to see dolphins. Wildlife watching being the unpredictable activity it is, we sadly did not see any dolphins but we did see seals, artic terns, and guillemots. Plus it was a beautiful sunny day, which we definitely appreciate in Scotland!

Boat trip

Moray Firth

A distant guillemot

Cawdor Castle

It’s not a UK holiday if you don’t visit an old house, am I right? Cawdor castle was built in the 14th century but never saw any defensive action – it’s just a nice, fortified house. It also has a holly tree growing inside the house because of a funny legend you can read about here if you’re interested.

The castle had beautiful gardens and an incredible forest that they called simply ‘the Big Wood’, and rightly so, for the trees are enormous!

Cawdor Castle

Siskin

Highland Wildlife Park

You may have heard that a polar bear cub has been born in the UK this year – the first time in 25 years. Well, it’s at the Highland Wildlife Park and we saw it playing with its mother. We also saw the infamous Scottish wildcat, which was amazing enough, but she had kittens! Wild kittens! I wanted to take them all home with me.

Scottish wildcat

Scottish wildcat kitten

At the park you can walk around the areas that have the enclosures but you can also drive around the park on a mini safari. There are bison roaming free, as well as vicuna, horses, deer, and an elk, though we could not find the elk anywhere.

The other highlight was seeing the red squirrel. After a week of seeing bushy red tails disappearing out of the corner of my eye faster than I can take my lens cap off, we finally had a good look at a wild red squirrel who wandered into the woods to eat from a nut feeder.